The formal step that turns a dome symmetrical on every side into a building with one axis only, so that feeling becomes will.
The Single Axis Of Symmetry in Anthroposophy is the formal step by which a building motif that is symmetrical in every direction of space, four columns carrying a dome, is converted into a form that possesses one axis of symmetry alone. Rudolf Steiner described the step on 25 October 1914 at Dornach, in the lecture cycle published as The Dornach Building (GA 287), while the first Goetheanum was under construction. The all-round symmetrical dome, he said, corresponds to the human being who has risen from lying to standing and so has come into feeling, which is how the Greek felt the sky above him as a spiritual dome. The single axis adds what the Greek did not carry: the passage from feeling into will, from standing into walking. In German the motif is one with nur eine Symmetrieachse, and the same law governs living form: radial symmetry belongs to what stays put, one axis to what moves.
The single axis of symmetry is Steiner's name for the moment when architecture stops being a dome and becomes a direction. A form symmetrical on all sides holds the visitor in place; a form with one axis carries the visitor forward. Steiner built the first Goetheanum on that difference, and told the workers at Dornach that the progressing motif is the motif of the will.
In Steiner's Own Words
In a sense, the human being rising from tranquility must not only transition to standing, but also to walking. They must artistically become acquainted with the sphere of the will alongside the sphere of the emotions. This can only be achieved by transforming the universally symmetrical into the symmetrical with only one axis of symmetry. So that one can say: at the moment when we transform the building motif into one that has only one axis of symmetry, we have expressed in the building not only the experience of the human being who is moving from rest into feeling, but also that of the human being who is moving from feeling into will, into walking. A progressive motif is the motif of the will.
What it Means Today
Hermann Weyl gave the Vanuxem Lectures at Princeton in 1951, and Princeton University Press published them in 1952 as Symmetry, the book that still sets the vocabulary. Weyl begins with bilateral symmetry, the mirror form of a single plane, and separates it from the rotational and spherical symmetries a form can afford when it does not need to go anywhere. The sea anemone and the flower head are radial: they take the world from every side at once and stay where they are. The animals gathered under the name Bilateria are built on one axis, and that axis is inseparable from directed movement and from a head end that meets what is coming. Steiner is making the same distinction in 1914 with a chisel rather than a proof. The four columns under their dome are the anemone; the Goetheanum with its west-to-east progression is the walker.
Thalira synthesis: Weyl reads the single axis backwards, from the fact of locomotion to the geometry that permits it, while Steiner reads it forwards, from an inner deed of will to the form that will hold it, and a reader who holds both readings at once has the whole of the Dornach argument. In practice it gives a way of standing in any building: ask whether it holds you in the middle or walks you end to end, and you have read the soul-activity its architect worked from.
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